User Involvement

User involvement is a high priority, cross-cutting theme within COMPASS. The collaborative has an agreed User Involvement strategy, and its aim is to improve our research by achieving effective user involvement in COMPASS activities by building and maintaining long-term relationships with service user groups and by encouraging and enabling user involvement at all levels of COMPASS activity.

In October 2007, the Management Board appointed a new lead for user involvement Professor Scott Murray, and a linked worker, Dr Marilyn Kendall. Scott and Marilyn are working with COMPASS' two service user advocates, Peter Rainey and Carolyn Morris, to ensure the continued success of the strategy.

We were delighted that Derek Stewart and Dave Ardron were able to attend the June meeting of the Board and provide a valuable training session for all the Board members. Derek and Dave have a wealth of experience in the field of user involvement. Derek is a past Chair of the NCRI's Consumer Liaison Group, and Dave is its current Chair. Following directly on from this session we all met with the COMPASS post doctoral researchers for an informal discussion of user involvement issues, and have set up an shared webspace within the COMPASS site to enable us to continue to communicate and support user involvement in research.

If you are a service user involved in research for COMPASS, or are a researcher involving users in your study, please get in touch to tell us about it. We are keen to hear about your experience and plans.

If you would like further information about, or advice on, user involvement in COMPASS please contact: Marilyn.Kendall@ed.ac.uk Tel: 0131 650 9235